Our Approach

We pride ourselves on our well informed and direct approach to marketing and communications in the education sector. We take each client project as an individual, and tailor our services to your requirements, ensuring that you achieve what you need from us.

When approaching us, don’t ever worry about it being “too early” for a discussion. Our most successful projects often begin as a simple discussion long before a brief is ever prepared, and we prefer it that way

Our work with you begins with defining the problem. Then we’ll work with you to define the project and approach towards finding a solution. Your problem can be as simple as “we don’t have enough students applying”, “parents don’t even know that we’re here”, “our research stories aren’t being read”, or “our alumni just aren’t engaging with us”. If your problem feels vague and you don’t know what the answer is, we’ll help you to define it before you commission us to work with you.

Once we’re commissioned to work with you, the next stage is for us to find out everything we need to know to make your project a success. We ask a lot of questions, and we always start with gaining an understanding of your institutional strategy.

Our discovery phase may include:

Stakeholder research

Defining and prioritising objectives

Audience research

Audits and analysis of existing work

Competitor research and benchmarking

With our research complete, we move to the development phase. Here we could be doing any of number of things for you, depending on your project. This may include:

Clients increasingly ask us to help them implement a strategy and plan now too. Our delivery phase may include:

Developing implementation, resource and project plans to make your strategy a reality

Creating content for your websites, social media or even offline channels

Developing measurement and evaluation plans

Presenting concepts to colleagues and senior managers and securing their buy-in for your approach

Helping you to create role descriptions and to recruit the right people to advance your organisation’s digital communications (we even sit on interview panels from time to time for our clients), or writing briefs for further outsourced work with other agencies

Our aim is to become a company that you can depend on. Even when a project is complete, many of our clients retain our support to help advance their digital communications and content strategy. This can help you with:

Ongoing buy-in and engagement for your vision and approach

Helping to navigate through internal politics and the distractions of day-to-day life in your school, college or university

Our approach has been developed and refined by working with over 100 organisations in the education and education-related sectors (such as research organisations). This means that our specialist approach is designed to help with issues and complexities that are particular to the education sector and the political, social and cultural issues influencing the education sector around the world.

Below we outline just some of the specific challenges that we support the education sector with.

Student Marketing & Recruitment

We have extensive experience in developing content strategies, digital strategies and social media plans, as well as planning content for websites designed to enhance every stage of the student recruitment journey. This involves understanding the complex decision making processes that an individual goes through to decide the future of their education, and aligning digital approaches to each stage in their journey. Through our work with schools, we also have excellent experience of engaging parents through digital communications too.

International Outreach

Most of our clients have a strong international outlook, and many of them have a presence in multiple countries or attract people from diverse nationalities and cultures. We have extensive experience of planning approaches and making recommendations for international engagement. Within our team we also have specific expertise and native-speaker support for the use of Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, amongst others.

Corporate Communications & Reputation

Many of our team have training and experience in public relations, journalism and corporate communications. We understand the absolute necessity of a outstanding reputation for an organisation, and the importance that this reputation is consistent in a digital world. We have advised organisations on community engagement, press and media relations and other stakeholder engagement activities utilising the power of digital and social media.

Alumni Engagement

Audience advocacy is one of the most important aspirations we have for our clients. Engaging with your alumni community is a powerful way of motivating advocacy and building an ongoing connection with and commitment to your school, college or university. Getting this right through digital channels is a challenge, but we are here to help by providing insights, advice and creativity to help make a difference with your alumni relations activity.

Research Communications

Our team includes those who have previously worked for research-intensive universities, and business, science and technology journalists well versed in creating compelling content from research stories. Communicating your research can be challenging, but we can work with you to help define the objectives underpinning your need to communicate your research, better understand your audiences, and create content strategies and channel plans to ensure you tell the story of your research successes and insights effectively.

Fundraising

From developing messaging and content for case for support materials, through to developing creative approaches to using social and digital media for your fundraising campaign. We can help you to create and shape your digital engagement for your fundraising campaign underpinned by thorough audience research, and our creative approach to planning your content.

Internal Staff & Student Communications

From developing strategies for student engagement, through to advising on content planning and implementation for staff intranets. Our work begins by truly understanding the culture of your organisation, and conducting research that helps you to fully understand the wants and needs of your staff and students. In turn we’re able to advise on communications approaches that will work.

A Problem Shared…Talk With Us

Contact us to have an initial discussion about the challenges that you face and to better understand how we may be able to help you.